Strongly Worded

Automotive Humilation

So, remember my foster car, the one I'm taking care of for a friend-of-a-friend who's spending the year in England?

Well, said car has been the source of recent humiliation.

1) My daily drive to work includes a very rough stretch of road full of cracked pavement and potholes. This leads to daily anxiety about the tires. For weeks, I've been meaning to check the tire pressure or the air pressure or whatever it's called. However, I don't know how to do that. Ultimately, I overcame my shame and asked the guy at the service station to show me, and I even did one of the tires myself as an effort to "fish for a lifetime." But, even though the guy was ultra nice, I still felt like a an incompetent Woman Driver.

2) I've been similarly worried about the status of the oil, because my dad has encouraged me on multiple occasions to get it checked. Which I did months ago, and apparently very luckily so, because they had to put in two containers of oil, and also apparently, had I not taken care of this, I would have caused serious damage to the car. Since then I think about the oil alot. Last week, I asked the guy who filled my gas tank(which I also don't know how to do) to check it. Gentle readers, I could not find the lever that opens the hood. Even the guy couldn't find it. There was a orange lever beneath the wheel, but I assumed that it was intended for some emergency purpose, and that if I pulled it I would set off alarms or airbags or something. I had to drive away without checking the oil. When I was safely parked at work, I got out the manual and learned that--yes--the orange lever opens the hood.

3) I can't park. I suck at parking. I don't even attempt parallel parking, but I can't even consistently get the car within equal distance from the yellow lines in a parking lot. Even worse, I really have difficulty getting the car close to the curb, even when there is an empty curb ahead of me. I am so embarassed by this that I try to park far from my house so that my landlady won't observe my 15-minute long process of approaching the curb, opening the door, finding that the car is still too far away, and starting over.

4) I may have left my lights on recently and had to ask Bob at work how I would know if the battery had died (it's fine).

Do other people come out of the womb knowing this stuff? Should I have paid more attention in Driver's Ed?

Posted by Dori at 9:48 AM